The
Arts Music
The arts were very much appreciated in our home.
The walls were covered with paintings, sketches, prints, copper engravings,
wood carvings, and decorative textiles. My parents did not consider themselves
artists especially, but they cherished art and collected things when they
could. We had many well-worn art books to leaf through, and they encouraged
us to try our hands at art projects. When available, we were taken to
theatrical, ballet, and orchestral performances.
Of all the arts, music was probably the most loved. My dad had actually
operated a music store for a short time, before I was born. This was during
the heyday of 78 rpm records, and we had an extensive library, equally
divided between classical music and jazz. Among the gods of jazz in our
household were Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Sidney Bechet, Billie Holliday,
and Scott Joplin. In the classical vein, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert,
and Rachmaninov were favorites. Sunday mornings were often devoted to
classical music, and the game in our house was to guess the composer,
...
I can remember quite early in life attempting to sketch or paint things around me. My hand-eye coordination has alwaysbeen fairly good, so I was able to create reasonable likenesses of real objects or scenes. I was particularly fond of trying to copy images from photographs or other artist's works, as a way to learn how they had accomplished the rendering.
Visual expression through line, color, texture, form, and composition engenders in me an immediate emotional response. When these elements coalesce into a singular statement, my soul will resonate, and I will "get" the message. I know when I am in the presence of great art through this feeling or vibration. If I don't get this feeling, I no longer pay attention and move on to other matters.
I have never felt that I am a great artist; to the contrary, I consider myself mediocre in this field. Nonetheless, I take great pleasure in making sketches and paintings, mostly as mementos of ...
In my final years of high school, I became enamored with photography. My older sister, Rain, had married Roland Jacopetti, a professional photographer living in San Francisco, California, and exposure to his work whetted my appetite for this art form. It wasn't long before I had my own 35mm camera and had set up a closet darkroom at home. The magic of seeing the images I had framed appear, first on the roll of film as negatives, and then as enlarged prints, was exhilarating. The facility of capturing a moment with a camera and then later massaging the image into a pleasing work of art is very appealing.
As a freshman at the University of California at Berkeley, I started to pursue photography professionally. I joined my brother-in-law, who had become a drama student there, in taking production stills of their theatrical performances. The harsh theatrical lighting presented a tremendous challenge to capturing the nuance of any given scene. Around this same time, I also started taking publicity photos for the Berkeley Folk Music Festival.
In this role, I met some of the heroes of American Folk Music: Pete Seeger and his father Charles, Doc Watson, and Joan Baez, to name a few.
The concept of combining my interest in music with imagery through the medium of film really fired my imagination. I dove right into the idea, first experimenting with super-8 film, then soon graduating to 16mm equipment. I met somebody who knew the rudiments of editing film and was willing to show me the basic techniques. I scrimped and saved to buy my own equipment so I could work inexpensively at home. I would take the camera with me, wherever I happened to go, and just filmed scenes that attracted me, thinking I would piece something together later. In fact I had this notion that I could acquire a tremendous library of such scenes from real life, and then have it available later to edit from at will. This is a rather romantic idea that has never quite worked out for me.
I did get a few professional jobs as a cinematographer, on low-budget, or no-budget productions, which mostly provided me with some much-needed experience in this new medium. For many years I considered myself a budding filmmaker, but often worked at other jobs to make ends meet.
I took the camera to a party in the North Beach
area of San Francisco and filmed some semi-abstract, dreamy scenes at
the "pad" of poetess Lenore Kandel and her charismatic longshoreman
boy friend, Sweet William. I don't think I ever screened this footage
for them, but the fact that I was filming was remembered. Several months
later, after I had moved to a cabin in the redwoods of Sonoma County,
a couple of hours north of San Francisco, I was startled by the deep-throated
rumble of a Harley Davidson motorcycle pulling up to my door sometime
after midnight.
Little did I know when I started experimenting with animation that this would consume nearly a decade of my life's energy. At first I just wanted to see if I could accomplish with animation something that I had considered trying to do in film: show the advancing maturation of an individual from birth to death. I conceived of a simple image of the face of an infant, centered on the screen, which would then very slowly reveal the aging process. Once I got started actually drawing this, I realized that to an audience this might seem a little boring, so I changed the idea so that the age would continue to mature, but the individual would transform from person to person, and switch sexes. To make the project especially challenging, I needed to draw all of this in black and white negative, because I wanted the background dark; with all of my experience in photography, I found that I could do this without too much trouble.
The idea behind animation is that a series of nearly identical images are filmed, one or two frames at a time, so that when they are later projected sequentially, the illusion of movement occurs through the differences among all the frames. There are a variety of technical ways of achieving this movement, and for the above project I chose one of the simpler ways: under-the-camera animation, where the image being filmed is simply manipulated directly beneath the camera and is changed.
I borrowed a friend's little light box and mounted my 16mm camera securely above it. Then I looked for some kind of pigment that I ...
Creating animation tends to be a very inward, personal, even lonely experience. After years of this kind of focus, and with an emerging desire to be more involved in social issues, as I had been with documentary film, I looked for a project that would take me in this direction. I was particularly troubled by the dangerous polarization between capitalism and communism that I had grown up with. I felt that prevailing attitudes that were being promoted in the United States toward the Soviet Union were very biased, and I really wanted to know what the picture actually looked like from the other side.
I conceived of a project of documenting life and thoughts from a Soviet perspective by going there as a tourist, with a video camera. I felt that if I traveled as a tourist, actually with a group of other tourists, I would not arouse the suspicion that I would expose some aspect of Soviet life through a professional exposé. Also I really wanted the freedom to tape images and interviews, without someone from the Soviet government standing behind my back and possibly influencing the situation. I discovered that the Earthstewards Network had been conducting citizen diplomacy tours to the Soviet Union for several years, and this seemed like the perfect venue for my purpose: I could merge with their group as a tourist and they would lead me to people who wanted to make contact with North Americans. So I signed up for A Journey of the Heart with the Earthstewards, a three-week tour to Czechoslovakia, the Ukraine, and Russia.